Imagine an ocean consisting entirely of gold coins, near which you are
lying on a lounger made of dollar bills.
Only someone like Scrooge McDuck can really afford such a thing.
Well...him and Jeff Bezos.
In 2013 Forbes estimated the net worth of the
richest dude on the planet to be about 65.4 billion dollars.
But this is just a tiny drop in the ocean of
the total amount of money in the world.
And as you may remember, the Disney character’s bank vault was huge.
What will happen if you collect all the finances of the world in one place?
How much space will they occupy and what will be their mass?
Let’s figure it out.
To turn every last cent into real, physical money...we may need as much
as an entire continent to hold it all.
The fact is, most standard valuables, such as banknotes, coins, and bank accounts
deposits, make up only a tiny part of all the money that exists.
And when I say “only”, I mean about 5 trillion dollars.
The overwhelmingly vast majority of modern wealth is
stored electronically or as securities.
Let’s start with our little baby currency bitcoin.
After all the recent volatility of bitcoin’s exchange rate, the
total value of the digital currency has now settled at roughly 5 billion dollars.
That’s nothing compared to all the silver used in the entire world - which
comes in at about 14 billion dollars.
Jeff Bezos, for those of you who don’t know, is the richest man
on the planet.
To overtake his total net worth using silver, it would be
necessary to extract from the Earth about 10 times more of this valuable
metal.
According to Forbes, Bezos now has at his disposal about 139
billion dollars.
This founder of uber-successful online retailer Amazon dot
com can be envied somewhat his riches, as he can buy literally anything
he wants.
Except for Apple Incorporated - you may have heard of them -
- Amazon is now the second most valuable company in the world.
Both companies recently achieved a total market
capitalization of over 1 trillion dollars
though they have fallen back a bit since then.
With growth rates like this, these two giants of Silicon Valley may soon
become more valuable than gold itself, in that the total value of the
precious yellow metal in the world comes to slightly less than 8 trillion
dollars.
We shall see.
But even an amount this large - the value of all the
gold in the world - pales in comparison to the total value of all the shares
of stock on the world market.
If you join the club, become another “Wolf of Wall Street”, and somehow manage to collect
it all, you will become the proud owner of approximately 70 trillion
dollars in total capital.
And if by some chance you manage to collect all of the IOUs for all of the
world’s debt, the amount you will get will be an incredible 199 trillion
dollars!
But that’s not all.
There is also a financial security traded around
the world known as derivatives - contracts for the future value of an
underlying asset.
This can be almost anything: from any product, to even
the state of the environment.
It’s impossible to calculate the total amount of derivatives at play in the world at the
moment, but approximate calculations give a figure of several quadrillion
dollars.
Let’s try to put into perspective the immense scale of such
an amount of money.
A quadrillion has fifteen zeros after the number.
To understand just how much space this capital would take, let’s
calculate its approximate mass...
So, a million dollars in 100 dollar banknotes, even though you could
cram it in a large briefcase or small suitcase, would weigh about 22
pounds, or 10 kg, by itself.
So don’t be too quick to believe Hollywood movies where the
characters run out of a bank with multi-millions loaded in bags after
robbing the joint.
It’s just to dang heavy to do that.
To transport 4 billion dollars you’re gonna need a 40-ton cargo container.
So, our entire money supply: including banknotes, coins, and bank
deposits, is about 81 trillion dollars, which would weigh more than 800 thousand
US tons - or 1.6 billion pounds.
To transport an amount that big, you’re gonna need a
whole convoy of trucks...or perhaps several container ships.
A hypothetical 1 quadrillion dollars would have
a mass of 10 million tons.
If you made a stack out of it, it would be tall
enough to reach the Moon,
return to back to the Earth, and then reach back up into the upper
atmosphere once more.
I should mention that I am using a standard Ben Franklin $100 bill for all
of my calculations.
If you don’t convert all this money into $100 dollar
bills, but into single dollars, then the total weight can be safely multiplied
by 100.
And this isn’t even counting all the coins, unregistered
banknotes, outdated bills, and counterfeit cash in circulation.
We should be glad that our world banking system is gradually
moving to an electronic format.
Banknotes with large denominations are slowly being
withdrawn from circulation...
So, let’s assume you have managed to somehow get all the cash from
all around the world and gathered it in one location.
Saving this money - or dealing with it in just about any way,
shape or form - is gonna be a huge problem.
If you throw it all into a big pile, the resulting heap of
money will be about the same height as the Empire State Building.
An overwhelming portion of this mound of dough will be coins, and the
most common of them will be the 1 cent US penny.
At the moment, there are about 150 billion of these coins in circulation,
with a total weight of about 30,000 tons.
Overall, American money will make up about 30% of
your wealth, with the European Union’s contribution being about 15%.
The rest will come from a variety of different slightly less popular and
even exotic currencies.
So, if you wanna even try and spend all that cabbage, you’re gonna have to travel all
around the world...probably for the rest of your life.
But if you still want to repeat Scrooge’s entertaining diversion, I implore
you to be careful: that many coins can be fatal.
Don’t believe me?
Well let’s looks at something related that occurred
way back a hundred years ago in 1919.
In Boston Massachusetts in the USA, a huge molasses
storage tank burst.
I know...you’re thinking, “Molasses?
Who can that hurt?”
But the syrupy liquid turned into a tsunami, moving at a speed of
100 miles or 60 km/h.
It swept through the city, killing 21 people and
sending 150 more to the hospital.
This is known as the Great Boston
Molasses Disaster.
And that was just molasses.
Now imagine the consequences if a mountainous wave of coins
moved with such a stunning momentum…
And don’t even think about trying to protect yourself from all these
shekels and six-pence by putting it behind walls.
Every building needs a solid foundation, the size of which is proportional
to the size of the building.
Given the weight of total money supply, building something with
such a foundation is well-nigh impossible.
You would have to pave over something like the entire Australian continent
to build a building for your money that doesn’t cause any harm.
In addition to all of the bills and coins of the world, we might also try and
count some of our natural wealth.
Romantics say that our planet has tremendous aesthetic value that cannot be
valued in mere dollars and cents - literally, it is priceless.
But pragmatic scientists have begun to view things differently.
They believe that by adding up the total worth of
some of our environmental riches, we might then realise its true value,
and so better cherish and preserve it.
There is a BBC Earth index, based on research within the framework of
the United Nations Environment Program.
According to this index, each useful resource has a cost, based on its impact
and value to the planet: so, for example, fresh water comes in at 73
trillion dollars.
The lives of everyone, and the state of our economies,
depend on fresh water, so they value it equal to the total value of
one year of world GDP; Trees and coral reefs, which form the basis
of our ecosystem, are estimated at 26 trillion dollars.Sea fish
and plankton that clean our oceans and feed us cost about 496
billion dollars; Bees and other pollinating insects, the foundation of
agriculture, receive a price tag of 170 billion dollars; Wetlands in the US,
protecting the coasts from hurricanes, are estimated at 23 billion dollars;
And national reserves and certain types of fauna, without which
the balance of nature would be disturbed, are worth hundreds of millions.
However, there is another perspective on the wealth of our world.
A number of scientists believe that we Earthlings
are ecological bankrupters.
That is, over the very short period of our existence
on the planet, we have managed to spend, use up, or severely deplete
almost all available resources.
And yet, our planet is still quite valuable.
Astrophysics from the University of California derived a universal
equation that allows one to calculate the value of celestial bodies.
This formula takes into account the age, mass,
and size of the planet, as well as it’s temperature and potential suitability
for humanity for human colonization and habitation.
It turns out that the value of our home the planet Earth is “only” 5 quadrillion dollars.
But our neighboring planets are far, far cheaper: our future colony Mars
is estimated at 14 thousand dollars.
I’d snap it up in a second at that price.
And Venus has no price tag at all due to its poor climate.
All of the different exoplanets found in the last 3 years, which NASA says are possibly
suitable for human life, are also in the “discount department”
of the planetary Department Store.
The most Earth-like of these exoplanets, Gliese 581,
is worth a measly 150 thousand
bucks.
And KOI 326.01 - is valued at 250 thousand dollars.
But yeah...When the astronauts get there, prices
will surely double….
But back to Earth.
In order to continue to maintain its balance, the planet
need something real and tangible to offset previous losses.
So, NASA has come to the rescue.
In 2022, the intrepid space agency plans to launch a mission to explore Psyche-16, an
asteroid located in the Jupiter
region.
Unlike most cosmic bodies, which consist of stone with an ice
mantle, Psyche-16 is rich in metallic iron and nickel.
Given the asteroid’s width, which is about 124 miles, or 200 kilometers,
the researchers were able to an estimate of its value.
This space pebble quietly puttering around the solar system has a value of as
much as 10 thousand quadrillion dollars!
It is likely that billions of years ago, Psyche-16 was the core of an early
planet, comparable in size to Mars.
But due to frequent collisions with comets, it lost its rocky shell.
American company Planetary Resources called this asteroid “a
gift from the heavens”, and are planning to send special robots to do
some space mining, retrieve some of those valuable resources, and bring
them back to good old Earth.
On the other hand, some scientists believe that dreams of mining
such space riches are in vain.
The cost of launching robots may exceed all permissible limits, and, in addition,
even if successful, the global economy could change entirely, leaving no
space for simple metallurgy…
So, in the end, big riches don’t always provide the endless
happiness that some believe...
The old saying is true: money isn’t everything.
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